Displacing the in-between

The land reclamation district of Agro Pontino in Italy and the Mackenzie Delta in the Canadian Arctic are two regions as different as can be imagined, but they share an important tension. On the one hand, their social and material life has thrived ‘in-between’ through people’s continual corresponding with their shifting ecological, economic and political rhythms; on the other hand, colonial and modernising missions have repeatedly attempted to delineate and control these regions and their inhabitants, positioning their flexible lives ‘between’ fixed categories and territories. This is particularly striking in the fate of two settlements, the city of Littoria, now Latina, in Agro Pontino and the hamlet of Aklavik in the Mackenzie Delta, where logics of permanence, modern infrastructure and governmental control were to replace the ambiguous realities of marshland and delta life. For approaching this tension, we follow Ingold’s distinction of ‘between’, as a marginal or liminal setting squeezed amid, or linking, two different and clearly defined realms, from ‘in-between’, where things and positions are not fixed or bounded, but becoming in correspondence with one another. Aklavik’s and Latina’s histories and current predicaments suggest that mobile and indefinite spheres of life were turned into ‘problematic’ infringements of categories through particular interventions and entanglements. In Latina, these included fascist land reclamation in the 1930s, as part of which the city itself emerged, first as an integral part of the infrastructure of reclamation, but soon as a model fascist town, superimposed on and detached from the newly controlled landscape. In Aklavik, which grew from a fur trading post in the early twentieth century, urban infrastructures like roads and pipes run up against the wet landscape, and colonial planners have sought to replace it with a ‘modern’ town on the edge of the delta. These material predicaments, which we will consider in the light of Ingold’s understanding of the ground and the atmosphere as interstitial zones of mixing and becoming rather than as impervious surfaces and empty volumes , are paralleled by other tensions of between and in-between, including the politics of enforcing and resisting categories and distinctions more widely, such as prescriptions for land use, fixed boundaries and ethnic belonging. This is where Ingold’s writing on the ‘genealogical model’ of substance etc. makes an important contribution, which must be developed further in order to address the political processes by which distinctions come to matter or are dissolved. This chapter sketches Aklavik and Littoria/Latina in the light of the between/in-between tension identified by Ingold, and links this both to wider discussions on social and material ‘seepage’ ( Cons 2020 ) spilling over colonialist and modernist containment and separation, and to a reflection of the containing tendencies of anthropological classifications.

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